Reviews

Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath

Many of the missions in the single-player campaign are the sort of recon-by-death puzzle maps that the genre has mostly moved away from. The remainder are mostly mediocre skirmishes made challenging by arbitrarily cutting Nod off from certain units. This is bad enough, but the control scheme manages to kill off the better missions, such as a terrific race against the clock to recapture the alien Tacitus made difficult by the necessity of using force-specific task forces. Oddly, one of the worst crimes in the PC version, "The Betrayal of Kilian Qatar," actually comes off pretty well here. What starts off as a chance to re-fight one of the best missions from Command & Conquer 3's single-player campaign from the other side turns into a puzzle mission that weaves in and out of the battle. If this concept could have been expanded upon, perhaps by offering the player multiple task forces and multiple objectives, there might really be something here.

What would an expansion pack be without some new, highly destructive toys to play with? Kane's Wrath has that covered. Each side sports several new units and while none of them are particularly novel, the new GDI and Nod factions are a lot of fun. Particular favorites include the GDI's Zone Shatterer (a lightly armored mobile sonic emitter that does some pretty horrible things to the enemy) and Nod's Awakened (the mother of all heavy infantry units). The Scrin's new Cultist and Prodigy mind-control units, on the other hand, are great in theory (they can turn a well-ordered enemy force back on itself) but require a bit too much precision and button pressing to be really effective.

The biggest downside of the game's new units is that the only way to play most of them is as one of the new "sub-factions," a concept borrowed from Command & Conquer: Generals. Sub-factions are specialized versions of the three main sides. Each is built around a slightly re-jiggered version of their side's basic strategic bias. Nod's Marked of Kane, for example, eschew their faction's penchant for hit-and-run tactics in favor of a turtler's reliance on brutally tough infantry units. Each faction considered on its own is a lot of fun, though vanilla faction multiplayer fans get left out in the cold and sub-factions can act as strategic straitjackets. The side that really gets the short end of the stick is the Scrin's Traveler-59 faction. This is a group that's all about subtlety, mind-control and micro-management and they're nearly impossible to play with the awkward controls.

One of the biggest back-of-the-box attractions for Kane's Wrath also turns out to be a bust. The game's new "epic units" are enormous, hideously expensive mega-units that do a ton of damage and are just insanely creative enough to make actually seeing one on the battlefield a rare treat. The problem is that they're pretty much strategically useless, especially in multiplayer (except occasionally in Siege mode). Command & Conquer's breakneck pace means that the game is usually settled by the time anyone builds up enough resources to get one and if they do, they require too much player attention and are way too fragile considering how much they cost. At best, they're a clever gimmick, a way to end the game by rubbing it in the face of a player you've thoroughly dominated.

In the end, Kane's Wrath greatest sins are attributable to an all-too-common error: not taking the strengths and limitations of both PCs and consoles into account when porting from one to the other. The original console version of Command & Conquer 3 did and came up with a fairly decent console RTS. Kane's Wrath is manifestly notCommand & Conquer 3. Many of the new features change the game significantly and it's obvious most of them were designed with the PC in mind. The result is an unfortunate comedown from the original game.